MakeMyTrip Acquires Corporate Travel Startup Quest2Travel

India’s largest online travel firm, MakeMyTrip, has bought majority stake in Quest2Travel, a Mumbai-based corporate travel startup, for an undisclosed amount and with this acquisition Nasdaq-listed MakeMyTrip marks its entry into the corporate travel segment, which it was contemplating for couple of years.

The acquisition comes within a week after MakeMyTrip announced a change in the company’s shareholding following which Naspers is exchanging its entire shareholding in MakeMyTrip for newly issued shares of China-based Ctrip, making it the largest shareholder in the company.

Founded in 2000, by Abhay Rangnekar, Quest2Travel is a bootsrapped web-based corporate travel management company offering services to large organizations to automate and manage all aspects of their employee travel. It offers an end-to-end work flow for employees to put in their travel requisitions, get approvals and make travel policy compliant bookings for air, hotel, guesthouses, cars, buses, rail etc. and avail of services relating to foreign exchange, travel insurance, visas, passport etc.

Quest2Travel has 200+ corporate customers accessing from 5000+ locations. It also counts large corporates as its clients such as Tata Motors, Aditya Birla Group, HDFC Ergo and Thermax among others. It was due to Quest2travel technology capabilities, where in 2005 IDBI bank became the first bank in the world to offer airline bookings using ATMs.

Last year, Quest2travel launched a native mobile app called Xpentra that allows users to create, edit and submit expense reports on the move along with the ability to capture and tag photographs of invoices and receipts.

Deep Kalra, founder and group chief executive officer, MakeMyTrip, said, “This investment will help us extend our service offerings to large corporates for their travel requirements while helping Quest2Travel benefit from the travel expertise and depth of supplier relationships that MakeMyTrip has forged over the years. We have historically focused on providing travel solutions for retail customers and with this investment we are making a decisive foray into providing travel solutions for corporate customers as well.”

Quest2Travel is MakeMyTrip’s fifth acquisition so far. The Gurgaon-headquartered company has earlier acquired ibibo Group in 2016, Mygola in 2015, EasyToBook.com in 2014 and HotelTravel.com in 2012.

Last August, MakeMytrip has made an investment in FabHotels, a Gurgaon-based online aggregator for hotel rooms. Prior to that in July, it invested in Bangalore-based Bitla Software Pvt Ltd, the parent of TicketSimply and HotelSimply — Cloud/SaaS platform for Bus Operators and Hotels respectively.